Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa

GENETIC DIASPORA: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa NOAH TAMARKIN Ohio State University I met Hilda Mpaketsane in December 2005 at a wedding in a small village in the Greater Sekhukhune district of the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Hilda lived nearby, worked as a cleaner for the local municipality, and was a cousin of the bride, at whose elderly parents’ house we were celebrating. It was after dark but still hot out; the ceremony and meal were finished and music played from speakers set up outside while some danced and others sat in groups enjoying cold drinks and beer, both store-bought bottles and libations home-brewed by the bride’s mother. Hilda walked up and joined a conversation that I was having in English and Sepedi with a group of women about what it means to them to be Lemba people, an ethnic identity made internationally famous after geneticists looked for and found a link between the Lemba and Jews.1 One woman explained to me that she was proud to be Lemba because of their cultural uniqueness and reputation as business people. Another said that her parents had told her from an early age that the Lemba were part of the Jews. Hilda agreed that they had always known their unique history and culture, but she elaborated that they had only recently learned that they were the black Jews and that this would connect them to other Jews in the world. She told me, “We discovered [it] after the arrival of [Tudor] Parfitt.2 He was doing the research, he took the saliva. You go to the laboratory. After that he came back and told us you are the Jews, the black Jews in Africa.” Wanting to understand further, I CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 29, Issue 3, pp. 552–574, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. ᭧ by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.14506/ca29.3.06 GENETIC DIASPORA told her that I was a Jew and asked if there was a relationship between us because of that. She explained, “The research made that relationship. Because we didn’t discuss that we were the Jews. After [the research] we discovered that we are the Jews.” The genetic test to which she referred was the second of two DNA studies that investigated potential links between the Lemba and Jews; Parfitt collected saliva samples for the study in 1996, just two years after the first postapartheid democratic elections had taken place and nine years after blood samples had been collected for the first Lemba DNA study beginning in 1987 (Spurdle and Jenkins 1996; Thomas et al. 2000). In the eighteen years between the beginning of the Lemba DNA studies and my conversation with Hilda, much—but not every- thing—had changed. In South Africa, especially in the rural areas that had been designated as homelands under apartheid and where my research took place, political landscapes had transformed, though economic precarity remained the norm for many, including many of the women at the wedding with whom I spoke. In molecular biology, the mapping projects of genomics had partially given way to postgenomic epigenetic inquiry, rendering these types of studies more peripheral than cutting edge (Abu El-Haj 2007). And internationally and especially in the United States, the study of genetic ancestry had transformed into a robust industry, marketing the idea of scientific certainty to individuals seeking personal connections to their unknown pasts. In the wake of the Lemba DNA studies, the BBC, NOVA, and the History Channel had produced television documentaries that featured prominent Lemba leaders alongside scientists and other scholars. Unlike Hilda’s assessment that the genetic research newly produced a relationship between Jews and the Lemba, these media representations encouraged an approach to Lemba people as a newly discovered lost tribe of Israel. Prompted by this representation, American Jews had traveled to South Africa beginning in the late 1990s to connect with Lemba people on the basis of the presumed commonalities of a shared Jewishness. By the time I met Hilda, she and many others strongly identified with their knowledge that they were the Lemba people, black Jews genetically certified as such. But Lemba concepts of Jewish genetics and diasporic connection do not simply mirror discourses established elsewhere, and Hilda’s repetition of Parfitt’s message to the Lemba that they were Jews does not necessarily replicate his meaning. Consider, for example, the perspective of another Lemba woman who was part of our conversation. She told me that my own Jewishness “means you are a Lemba.” How does her framing, which reverses which group might be 553 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 29:3 incorporated into the other, challenge the ideas of diaspora, DNA, and agency that create an image of the Lemba as a lost tribe of Israel? Brought together by the idea of genetic connection, how do Lemba people and their Jewish interloc- utors navigate their different understandings of the biological and cultural commonalities they hope to have with one another? Finally, how do divergent genomic knowledges articulate with the politics of belonging and the pursuit of citizenship in South Africa and transnationally? I frame Hilda’s and others’ assertions about their identities in terms of knowledge production rather than history or categories like “genetic Jews” because it was knowledge—both its source and its implications—that was at stake. Fol- lowing Hilda’s insistence that the genetic research created a relationship between Lemba people and Jews, in this article I contend that genetic data has enabled a novel way of imagining and enacting diaspora. I use the concept genetic diaspora to theorize how new connections, marked by inequality, are tenuously forged through national, racial, and religious differences imagined to be the same. Ge- netic diaspora constitutes an assemblage through which knowledge and belonging are contested (Deleuze and Gauttari 2009; Ong and Collier 2005; Stewart 2012). It continually re-emerges through new connections that some (but not all) par- ticipants experience as the rekindling of old ones. Recent research has examined the epistemologies of genetic history, the politics of selling personal genomic ancestry, and the subjectivities of American seekers of such information (Abu El-Haj 2012; Nelson 2008; Palmie´ 2007; Pa´lsson 2012; TallBear 2013). But commentators have paid little attention to encounters between American ancestry seekers and those they imagine as their genetic kin; they have likewise mostly ignored the subjectivities, genomic knowledge practices, and political stakes of the people on the other side of such encounters. In this article, by privileging the perspectives of Lemba South Africans and the historical and ethnographic contexts through which Lemba genetic data emerged and circulated, I offer an alternative reading of the social and political significance of DNA. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research conducted in South Africa between 2004 and 2006 and two additional months of research in 2010 and 2013, this article examines the Lemba DNA studies, the media archive they have enabled, and a series of Lemba encounters with American Jews, including myself. I include myself in this way because most Lemba people read my presence as a researcher equally as my presence as a Jew. I demonstrate that those impli- 554 GENETIC DIASPORA cated in genetic studies transform DNA into a resource that authorizes their own histories and politics of race, religion, and recognition. I argue that DNA and diaspora converge to create new sites of political belonging, ones marked by precarious connections that balance on the production of knowledge and its refusal. LEMBA DNA AND GENETIC DIASPORA American Jews and Lemba South Africans have become imagined as two parts of one whole through a series of mediations: the genetic data mediates the possibilities of representation; the Lemba media archive mediates the projected desires of Lemba leaders, filmed researchers, and television hosts; and different Lemba and Jewish interpretations of genetics mediate their desires for Jewish diasporic connection. Deborah Heath, Rayna Rapp, and Karen-Sue Taussig (2004) introduced the idea of “genetic citizenship” to describe the blurring of state and civil society, and of public and private spheres, evident in the lobbying efforts of parents of children with rare and debilitating genetic diseases. Their idea of genetic citizenship as a new kind of public within a nation-state enables me, by contrast, to examine a public—what I am calling genetic diaspora—that is organized through genetics but that falls outside any concrete recourse to states and claims of citizenship. For the Lemba, South African citizenship was indeed at stake in Lemba DNA, but genetic diaspora instead organizes a public in which it was hypothetical Israeli citizenship, both undesired and unrealizable by Lemba people, that was at stake. The DNA studies newly thrust the Lemba into a transnational spotlight, but the studies’ premise was more reiterative than novel. All Lemba origins studies, including those involving DNA, relied on the words and bodies of Lemba infor- mants, and Lemba authors repeatedly asserted themselves: knowledge production about Lemba origins was always multidirectional and interconnected. In the nine- teenth century and the early twentieth, for example, Christian missionaries wrote about the Lemba as potential “Semites” possibly descended from Jews or Muslims. They based their analyses on oral history, embodied cultural practices like cir- cumcision, endogamy, and dietary laws, and in one instance, comparisons of Lemba and Jewish noses (Jaques 1931). In 1936, Manasseh N. Mphelo published his own account of Lemba history and culture, adding to and critiquing earlier missionary writings and identifying his grandfather Maphangwa as Jaques’s infor- mant “Moshe,” whose knowledge and nose provided much of Jaques’s evidence 555 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 29:3 (Mphelo 1936).

Load more